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a lab worker testing for a coronavirus vaccine
‘Despite the fact coronavirus medicines will be discovered using vast sums of public money, the NHS may still have to pay through the nose for any final product.’ Photograph: Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters
‘Despite the fact coronavirus medicines will be discovered using vast sums of public money, the NHS may still have to pay through the nose for any final product.’ Photograph: Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters

As others pull together on a coronavirus vaccine, why is the UK siding with big pharma?

This article is more than 3 years old
Nick Dearden

The UK has refused to support a WHO initiative to make Covid-19 treatments patent-free

“The most urgent shared endeavour of our lifetimes,” is how Boris Johnson described the search for a coronavirus vaccine just a month ago. At the time, the prime minister urged countries to pull together and share their expertise. Yet if his government’s actions are anything to go by, it seems more interested in siding with big pharmaceutical corporations than turning vaccine research into a genuinely collective endeavour.

The last straw came on Friday, when the government refused to support a World Health Organization initiative to encourage countries to share research on coronavirus treatments and produce any final medicines patent-free. This would mean they could be distributed fairly according to need. The proposal, a voluntary scheme that would pool knowledge, intellectual property and data about coronavirus health technologies, is not particularly radical – but you wouldn’t guess that from the recent protestations of pharmaceutical corporations.

Pfizer called the proposal “nonsense”, while the big British companies working on coronavirus treatments, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKlein, refused to participate. When asked whether he would attend the launch of the WHO proposal, Thomas B Cueni, the director of the International Federation of Phamaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, a lobbying group, said he was “too busy”.

The reaction from this industry shouldn’t surprise us. Over the past three decades, big pharma has used its unparalleled lobbying muscle to secure market monopolies that vastly increase the power it holds over governments. Thanks to trade rules known as Trips (trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights) that were developed in the 90s to enforce minimum patent standards around the world, these corporations enjoy monopoly protection for new medicines they manufacture, allowing them to charge any price the market will endure.

These rules provide little incentive to produce the medicines desperately needed to treat illnesses common in low-income countries, such as sleeping sickness and cholera, but rather promote a narrow focus on drugs that mitigate chronic conditions common in the west, such as statins to treat high cholesterol. With chronic conditions, big pharmaceutical companies can sell the same medicines to the same patients for years, or even decades. Vaccines – designed to prevent diseases – are often used only once, and therefore don’t tend to be as profitable.

Governments have poured phenomenal sums of money into drug development to stimulate essential medical research that patents have failed to incentivise. But this money – like the UK government’s £500m of coronavirus research funding – rarely comes with any strings attached, allowing pharmaceutical companies to monopolise the resulting medicines. A recent study estimated that one contender for a coronavirus treatment, a hepatitis C medication produced by the pharma giant Gilead, costs $5 per course to produce. The academics who authored the study said the drug is currently on sale in the US for more than $18,000 per treatment course.

Despite the fact coronavirus medicines will be discovered using vast sums of public money, the NHS may still have to pay through the nose for any final product, while poorer countries could be unable to access the drug. It wouldn’t be the first time this has happened. In the 90s, millions died unnecessarily in the Aids crisis in sub-Saharan Africa, because the medicines to treat HIV were out of reach of most people. 

The WHO’s initiative launched on Friday is intended to avert a repeat of this. Many countries, rich and poor, support it – including Argentina, Mexico, South Africa, Norway, Portugal and Belgium. But for the British government, the patent system is sacrosanct. The UK seems desperate not to upset its own pharmaceutical corporations or the financial sector that makes substantial returns from these companies, which spend more money on share buybacks than on researching drugs.

Two weeks ago, British officials attempted to water down a resolution at the World Health Assembly to create a global “patent pool”, which would have encouraged the production of patent-free coronavirus drugs. Then, on Friday, they declined to support the new WHO initiative for pooling research. Given the base of big pharma in the US and the UK, the withholding of support by industry and governments in these countries could easily scupper the WHO’s plans. 

At that point it will be up to individual governments to use their power to override corporate patents. Nations including Germany, Canada, Chile, Israel and Ecuador have expressed their willingness to do so. This is perfectly legal, although big pharmaceutical companies might hope to convince us otherwise. 

There’s reason to believe that the British government has misjudged the public mood significantly. Recent polling in Britain and the US shows public support for making coronavirus medicines available internationally based on need, rather than ability to pay. And pharmaceutical companies have been careful to appear sympathetic to the need for “fair and equal access” to coronavirus treatments. Some, like AstraZeneca, have even pledged to supply vaccines at “cost price” during the pandemic. But with big pharma, each word needs to be carefully interrogated. As these companies have admitted, such pledges will have limited impact on the corporation’s profits because of vast public coronavirus subsidies. 

When it comes to the crunch, pharmaceutical companies treat healthcare as a commodity, not a right. If anything good comes of coronavirus, we may hope that it deepens the public understanding of the system’s failures, allowing us to build a genuinely public system of medical research and development. The WHO initiative could be the first step in that direction. 

Nick Dearden is director of Global Justice Now (formerly World Development Movement)

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